Ease. Joy. Inspiration.

Get Your Creativity On

I got lost in the grocery store the other day.

I’d love to be able to say that it wasn’t my regular store, or that it was a really large building. Or even that something had changed in the layout that threw me off. Nope, none of the above. What was different was me.

I had been playing online with new recipes, and my grocery list was full of items that I wasn’t sure how to pronounce and didn’t know on which shelves they lived. I was completely thrown out of my routine and felt like I was on a great adventure. I wandered, backtracked, found myself in aisles I never even knew existed, and totally lost track of time.

It was great!

I was already enjoying these new recipes, and I wasn’t even in the kitchen yet.

Have you ever been caught up in a project that makes you feel like you’re wearing a full-body perma-grin? That is our creative state expressing through us.

Whether you consider yourself to be creative or not, you are. It’s simply inherent to being. Don’t be fooled into limiting the forms of creativity that show up in your life: you may not use a hot glue gun, but perhaps you set a beautiful table. Maybe you don’t sew, but you have a knack for dressing with style. Could be that you can’t keep a plant alive, but you have the perfect, subtle decorative touch that makes all the difference.

The thing is, we need to nurture and cultivate our inherent creativity in order to be balanced human beings. We celebrate ourselves by expressing it. We stifle ourselves when we don’t.

Look at it this way: we are the bottle, our creative nature is the effervescence. Regular life is what shakes us up. Letting out our creativity celebrates our flavor (and keeps us from exploding!). Not attending to it either keeps us bottled up or makes us go flat (either way, it’s wasted).

We all have a need to express ourselves creatively. In what ways are you a creative being? In the comments below, share three things you did last week that lit you up — they could be sneaky forms of creativity! For me, I’ll say learning to collect and cook maple sap at a friend’s house, clapping along and laughing at an Acapella concert, and writing this post.